On Thursday 4 March the famous Dutch writer Harry Mulisch reopened the newly renovated Museum of Literature in The Hague.
Experience the writing process
See how books originate, from the first scribble to the last proofs. Read, hear, see and enjoy poems, fragments of prose, plays and the film versions of books. Get a feeling of the hubbub surrounding literary arguments and find out about the elevation – or is it ordinariness? – of writers’ lives.
Discover the Pantheon
“The Pantheon. 100 writers – 1000 years of literature” offers an overview of literature in Dutch from the Middle Ages until today.
You’ll find the classics cosily side by side, including Hooft, Vondel, Bilderdijk, Multatuli, Couperus, Gorter, Leopold, Nijhoff and Hermans.
There’s Thomas a Kempis, the author of the Imitatio Christi, too; the internationally acclaimed lawyer Hugo Grotius (aka Hugo de Groot); the Portuguese-Jewish philosopher Spinoza; the humanist Erasmus, who never wrote a word in Dutch; the great... letter-writer Vincent van Gogh; the great historian – but what a stylist! – Huizinga and the face of the Holocaust, Anne Frank.
For the first time, Flemish writers have been included in this canon. The twelfth-century poet Hendrik van Veldeke (although he’s really a Limburger without any clear national identity), the mystics Hadewych and Ruusbroec, and the encyclopaedist Jacob van Maerlant. Not by chance they’re all from the Middle Ages. In those days the Low Countries’ centre of gravity was actually in the South.
But nineteenth-century authors from Flanders have made the selection as well, including Hendrik Conscience (the Belgian Walter Scott, well-known for his “Lion of Flanders”) and Guido Gezelle (the brilliant poet-priest). Then from the twentieth century there’s, among others, avant-gardist Paul van Ostaijen, cynical melancholic Willem Elsschot (Cheese), tender anarchist Louis Paul Boon (Chapel Road) and jack-of-all-trades Hugo Claus (The Sorrow of Belgium).
You can join the Pantheon for that matter – when you’re dead. So Harry Mulisch will have to wait a while.
See an overview of the 100 writers selected by the Museum of Literature here.
Where?
Pr. Willem-Alexanderhof 5
The Hague
Tel: 070-3339666
Fax: 070-3477941
Close to The Hague Central railway station.
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